


But the Way She Catches Light

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cybermen and Daleks and Monsters; oh my!, F/F, Other, Regeneration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 11:57:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20173870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: The Doctor regenerates, and Missy is there.





	But the Way She Catches Light

Oh, the light, always the light—

The explosions are still flashing in photonegative afterimages when the light begins its insistent chorus, wordless against the rumble and the thunderclap, and as always these days this is the bright thing that he’s running away from, knowing all the wide-eyed while that the song isn’t anywhere: the song is in him. His cellular messengers, his macromolecules, his organelles and his enzymes and the protein train tracks of his being begin to dance to it, the migration, the remaking, so bright as it fills him it’s leaking through his skin. He is like a lighthouse, his eyes are the lamp, and the tempest in the dark of the sea trembles and shrinks from him, cowering into shadow in the corner of the universe.

See me! the light says, because in this moment it is all that anyone can see, and he is all the bandwidth, every frequency, and continuation is the signal and the medium, the message and the signified. To be, to be, to be...

The Doctor will return—the Doctor is in—

The light! The unraveling! The bursting unmaking that makes it possible; no, no, no!

To be undoes, to be destroys. To be scours clean the plane of personhood to prepare it for the promise of tomorrow. It razes the crucial counterpoint, the inconvenient condition: that already, _still_, he is.

And it is one thing to let go of being. Quite another to yield existence to yet another reconfiguration. What kind of resolution, what kind of ending doesn’t let you stop when you’ve finally figured out the answer?

But his body is a crucible, now, though he might douse the flame as much as he likes. He can hold the surface together, yet the heat is in his core, and already he is expanding too quickly to contain.

This will be quite the catastrophe.

He throws his head back. He roars his denial into the air. The air is hot, and tree ash litters his face, settling only long enough to be blown away again in the second explosion, alien, miraculous, new. The light sears. The chorus shouts. For a moment, everything is visible, everything can be seen.

~

Take a breath. Take another. Remember that this is what it means to have lungs, and a body. 

~

This is a forest. Or it was a forest. It looks like something really extreme has happened to it recently, which is not at all surprising.

Metal husks dot the landscape. They’re inert shells now, bereft of programming, machines emptied in the heat that passed through, knocked off their feet into purposelessness. 

It’s sad.

There’s smoke and steam everywhere. Trees stand stripped of leaves. The principal colour is grey. The sun is flickering. This is because it isn’t a sun, and also because it has been damaged. 

Never stare into the sun. Always wear sunscreen. Don’t panic. Don’t eat any pears. 

Always be kind. 

The nearest Cyberman is an actual body, less metal than rubber, one of the early models, fully intact. Person-shaped, so it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that this was a person once, a person who was cared about, and loved, with dreams and desires and emotions that were all ground away in the processing plant long before the resulting automaton was sent to the battlefield. It’s the Cyberman promise—that there wouldn’t have been any fear left, or grief or pain by the time of the cataclysm. Still...

There’s probably nothing to be done, but someone’s got to try. 

“Uh, uh, uh, don’t touch that!” 

The warbled warning is too late. Or rather, it’s completely disregarded, regardless of its timing. Ouch. Scorched fingers. Suck on those. Right into the whatsit, the soothing wet with them. 

Now, who was it tried to give the warning? 

A very purple lady is peering around the trunk of an inadequate tree. Funny how she hadn’t been noticeable until she was. She emerges from her hiding place, wavering and shimmering as she approaches in the heat distortion of the small fires between them that don’t seem to want to go out. She tuts. 

“I told you not to touch the scrap.” Her hands are cool and precise and somehow her touch is more soothing than a mouth. (Mouth! That was the word!) “It’s a good thing you’re not done knitting yet. Damaging yourself so early.” 

Something warm and bright tingles between their palms. The glow sets off a tremor of feeling somewhere deep below the skin, seismic. 

An echo of a stammer bubbles up. “I’m...sorry, I’m sure I know you, but...who are you?” 

A smirk—or a shadow—crosses the sharp features, otherwise a picture of nurturing concern. The eyes go big and round and lash-lined. 

“Why, I’m your girlfriend. You call me Master.”

The Master rolls a sleeve past the injured fingers, pushing the jacket back and folding a battered white cuff several times to shorten it above the wrist. “There. Isn’t that better? Now, be a good girl and let me look at you.” 

“Girl?” A cautious look around, a gesture at one’s chest. Nobody else here...girl? Me?

“Yes, dear. You’ve had a bit of a rearrangement. A wee bit, very wee. One can barely call you a girl at all, only we can’t all have perfect figures, and yours is very, well, you. Rest assured, you’re the same idiotic old man, just shorter and slighter, with less prominent...eyebrows. I’d lend you a mirror, except someone took mine, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

A description like that calls for an exploratory reconnaissance, and in the absence of a mirror, that means a hurried grab for the reduced eyebrows and other assorted pieces of evidence. It’s astonishing, it’s wonderful.

“I’m a woman now!”

“Yes, isn’t it exciting.”

“I was Scottish before.”

“It’s a trade off.” 

“I don’t think I’ve ever been a woman.”

The Master sighs theatrically and strikes a feature-enhancing pose. “You always did have to copy everything I do.” 

The newly-made woman scrunches her nose. “Not everything. I was the one who gave myself a name that was going to mean something in the universe. You copied me on that one.” 

“I did no such thing!”

“I was first.”

“The Rani was first.” 

“Oh, the Rani. I suppose she was first to all of it. Just loomed that way, wasn’t she? She had so much concentration, amazing!”

“A little too much, if you ask me.” 

Thing is, she can’t actually remember her name (only...it’s important), and it doesn’t look like her girlfriend is about to prompt her. It might be easy for some people, who aren’t half baked. The Master looks so ripe she’s about to burst, especially when she grins. 

Meanwhile, two sleeves rolled neatly to the elbow, which is—oh!—so much better that she starts waving her hands about, enjoying the air on her forearms. She feels more herself already, whoever that is. She smiles at the Master happily. The Master smiles back. Smiles all around. Smiles are good. She thinks she likes smiles. 

All this time, the steam has been condensing into clouds above them, and it begins to fall, as rain. Scars in the ground fill into puddles, fast becoming pools. 

The droplets land on the brand new contours of the brand new face, gathering into rivulets, dripping from hair that she can almost see on the soft edges of her vision. She reaches to clear her forehead, blinking, but the Master gets there first, smoothing a damp lock of hair (is it a bang? Is it a fringe? _Is it ginger?_) behind her ear. 

“Time to go, I think.” The Master inclines her head. “Quick sticks, look sharp.”

“Why? What are you worried about?”

“Nothing. We’ll be sodden. Saturated. Silly chilly.”

She turns on a dime, so sudden she seems ready to leave on her own. 

“No! Wait!”

The Master pauses. She waits. 

Their hands fit like they’ve been holding hands forever, which, of course, they have, but there’s a moment, at first, a shock seems to go through her, a bridling, a tension, a sharp intake of breath suppressed, as though the Master never expected to have her hand taken, as though such a thing doesn’t happen, even though there is so much light between them. 

~

Then they’re running. She isn’t sure whether they’re running to get away in a hurry or just because they can, but she loves it, loves the sensation of running, fast, hair flying, loves the feeling of doing it hand in hand. The Master bundles her through a doorway, and then they’re flying, up, up, up, faster still and cradled close and safe by inertial dampeners. 

The lift’s doors open to a stellar vision, a hole in the visible like a great heavy eye, absorbing everything it sees...and also to a rush of blue: alarm and recognition and joy and awe all at once, so much joy she could be made of it. It spills her across the threshold, into the control room. Here I am, and there you are, and everything is right in the universe, or can be righted, with us to make it right. 

Except she puts her hands in her pockets, and her pockets are empty. She turns to the Master, helpless. 

“Don’t look at me; you never let me have a key.” 

“I’m sorry,” she pleads to her TARDIS. “I’ve lost my key. It must have fallen out. Please let us in.”

But the TARDIS is having none of that. Instead of the click of a latch, there is a warning sound, a single bellstrike somewhere deep in the interior, and when she raises a comforting hand to a wooden panel, a muffled explosion. 

Two doors behind them slide open with a hiss and a _bing!_, twin lifts arriving. 

The Master mutters something affronted about relativity, time dilation, and ridiculous third-class mathematics, but most of this is lost in the crossfire of screaming lasers. The Master is efficient and deadly and a little thrilling, her whole body like a bow with an arrow notched in it. The vectors it traces are a dance, the weapons-fire her partner; the seriousness of its discipline belies its grace.

The laser screwdriver, though, that’s probably something to get angry about. But maybe later, when it wouldn’t seem so petty to be cross about it, and also when it isn’t actively being used to save her from an encore Cyber-slaughter.

“I could do with some help, here, dear!”

What is this, a clown car?

Cyberman after Cyberman exits the lifts, and the Master is the only one with a weapon—empty pockets, don’t like guns anyway—to hold them off. It isn’t going to be enough. 

There’s only one thing to do. She snatches the Master’s screwdriver.

“Are you mad, man? What are you doing?”

She aims it.

The Cybermen stop shooting. They stop where they stand. They’re all looking up. 

She has her arm straight in the air, pointing the screwdriver at the viewport in the ceiling. A screwdriver is a tool, not a gun. The arm holding the screwdriver shakes a little. Maybe she is angry.

“Oh, Doctor,” the Master breathes. 

In the sudden silence, in the quiet waiting, even the ship seems to be watching, monitors and engines hushed, enthralled. Overhead, the maw of the black hole swirls and swallows, filling the sky. 

“Believe me, a blast from this screwdriver on the setting I’ve just calibrated _will_ break that window. Survival is what you care about, right? With all your upgrades, everything you’ve done to yourselves, you still won’t survive a black hole. It’s your choice. I’ll always give you a choice.”

There is the sound of an entirely dry, though not entirely mirthless, derision. 

The Doctor—because of course, she is the Doctor, made again, yes, new, not sure yet what kind of Doctor she’s going to be, who she’s going to be—sets her expression, staring hard at the Cybermen. Their eyes, like the gravitational object above them, are lightless holes, emitting nothing. But she can almost hear the gears clicking and the nodes connecting in their cybernetic net. 

“You would also fall into the singularity.”

“Look in your memory banks. What happened on floor 507? I already thought I was going to die once today to stop you. I’m just as willing now as I was a few hours ago.”

_Please don’t say anything_, she thinks at the Master. _Don’t mention that _you’re_ not, not right now!_

It’s a desperate wish more than an attempt at communication. 

The Cybermen put down their arms. They back off. They retreat. They’re in the lifts. And then they’re gone. 

The Doctor lets out a really big breath. She turns to the Master, excited to share in their narrow escape, and glimpses a look of wooden terror and steely control, hurriedly masked. 

I’m sorry you had to go through that, she wants to say, but at the Master’s glare, the words stick in her throat. 

“I should have known you’d come up with a plan like that. Blow the window, compromise the whole ship, sacrifice us all to destroy the Cybermen? How very like you.”

“Is it?”

“No one’s better at brinksmanship or the bigger picture than you.”

Other screwdrivers, blue and green tipped, pointed at the sky. Speeches, threats, ultimatums. Desperate, last-ditch attempts to save the day with little more than hope and bravado and the awareness that no one else is going to do it unless someone sets an example. 

The Doctor staggers at the weight of it all. Her fingers spasm, losing their grip. The laser screwdriver slips out of her hand—

The Master steps up to catch it in a fluid motion that positions her to place her shoulder under the Doctor’s when her legs give out entirely. The Master’s body is warm and familiar against her side, even if her own is not. 

“There, there,” she says. “I’ve got you.”

~

She’s fizzing, forming, still ductile under the surface. Regeneration has blasted apart the building blocks of self, scoured the internal landscape as its excess energies leveled the external one. This new continent is a clay composited of the past, chemically equivalent, genotypically invariant, waiting to be given shape. 

_You’ve changed. I know you have._

Is it true? Is change in her power? 

The future has a shapeless clarity, but the present is a confusion of voices.

_I am an idiot! With a box—The original, you might say—It would be my honour._

_I need you to know we’re not so different._

So she sleeps. In sleep, the voices travel through her. In sleep, they are the solution from which her newest self precipitates. 

~

When she wakes, full of energy and so refreshed, the door to the TARDIS is open and the Master is nowhere to be seen. She’s curled up in a chair, her brogues off and her jacket missing.

The space janitor is watching her. 

“She said I was to keep an eye on you and to shout if the inertia lifts started up again.”

“Where did you come from?” the Doctor asks, brow knitting. “Have you been here all along?”

“I was hiding behind your ship. I guess I just...blended in.”

She starts to tell him she’s sorry he was frightened, but she stops. Was he frightened, or had he just been hiding? He had murdered earlier, in the name of fear. She hasn’t forgotten. 

“Exactly how many of you Doctor Whos are there?” the space janitor asks. “Is it some sort of franchise?”

“There’s just me. I’m—” she looks at him appraisingly, remembers his untimely bafflement, and weighs this against the understanding that the Master must be in the TARDIS— “I’ll explain later. Right now, I’d better—”

“Still biolocked!” comes the protesting voice. “Waiting for you! Bored!”

Hurrying to the call of her two favourite girls, she almost misses it, expectation laying a piece of what she knows over the parameter of what she sees. The TARDIS has changed herself. The control room has become a warm cave, as though the organic soul of the TARDIS is breaking through. The shadows that obscured before now shelter. The truth is, her TARDIS isn't a ship you pilot. The levers that remain, the buttons, the cranks are just there for her biped’s hands to hold, for her embodied being’s need to manipulate. 

“Be careful dematerialising,” the Master says. “I gave away my spare circuit.”

“Not a problem.” Confidence in the face of uncertainty, yes, that’s her.

Something goes _ding_, and a little tray pops out. 

“Biscuit?” the Doctor says before putting the custard creme in her mouth. 

“I don't think you've brought enough for the class.” 

_Do, me, sol, do!_ and a hatch opens on top of the console, from which a tiered cake stand emerges. 

“Oh!” the Master selects a petit four. 

_Do, sol, me, do._

Then a delicate twinkle, like Papageno’s bells. (Funny guy, Papageno. Flighty.) A chipped mug of brew and a tulip glass of Champagne. 

“By the way, your crisp crumbs are still everywhere.” 

There's a knock at the door. 

“Go away!”

“It’s the space janitor, the one who—”

The Master stomps up to the door and flings it open. “You’re safe now! Your crewmates’ descendents are safe! Run along! Go find them! Go on, Boy or Whatever! Go find them; they’re at the solar farm!” 

She slams the door.

“I was a janitor once,” the Doctor remarks.

“Let’s go. Pull the lever.” The sound as the TARDIS dematerialises is tentative, careful, but soon they’re on their way, away from this place, from the colony ship, the farm where the Doctor fell, where things went wrong. Open space is a relief, only the silence rendering audible in retrospect the white noise of the black hole and the straining grind of the engines. 

“We didn’t tell him which floor to go to.”

“Do you want to go back?”

The Doctor shakes her head, frowning. “No. No, leave him, he’ll be all right. They’ll all be all right. It’s time to go.” She has better things to do.

~

“Every star, you said. The universes are vast. What do we do when stars die, or are born, and die, before we ever reach them?”

“We’re time travellers. Our lives are long.”

“You wanted me to think about the finite. About how we couldn't go on, forever; you, me, any of it.”

“Would you want it to?”

“You told me once I did.”

“I was an old man, then. As an old man I thought _I_ was finished, done. Not going to go on.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“You came back.” Hands intertwining, no one hesitating now. “What made you change yours?”

“I was listening.”

~

Oh, the light! Forever, the light. She is effervescent and shining and with her too-large shoes gone, she is weightless with possibility, shedding layers of old clothing, socks and trousers and waistcoat, stripping down to see who she is now, skin bare and sensitive against the floor of her TARDIS, against the air and the skin of her oldest friend as she brushes her fingertips across a new-made topography. 

When they touch, the light sings between them, only warm now, a mere glow beneath the Master’s palm, passing over the Doctor’s cheek, the back of the Doctor’s hand, her thigh, golden trail as though a sun has left its corona behind it, careless. 

Summer returning, summer made rich with the chaff tilled into soil in autumn, forests thinned by fire for sunlight, seeds freed by fire from cones: maybe regeneration is summer, fertile and febrile and forever growing, green and reaching into the open spaces. Maybe regeneration isn’t so bad, if someone is there to catch you. The Master’s fingers along her leg trace a route or a pattern or a dance for her to follow. They’re barefoot together on the pulsing deckplates, and then they’re looking together into a mirror, the Master’s chin on her shoulder. 

She supposes it’ll matter to somebody, what her face looks like. She supposes she cares. It’s been a long time since she’s had yellow hair, a mop this soft and long and shiny. But for now what she sees in the mirror is the Master’s eyes on her, the Master’s eyes looking, enjoying the view as only someone who doesn’t see the difference can. Their eyes meet in the mirror. The Master’s hand finds its way beneath her shirttails. The other joins it, pressing against the crease of the vee at the tops of her thighs. 

A shudder goes through the Doctor’s entire body, new, involuntary, startling. The Master chuckles. “Welcome to the sisterhood,” she murmurs, and the Doctor is sure she’s heard this before.

They’re down on the floor after that, still in front of the mirror, the wardrobe warm around them, smelling of the wools and canvas and silks of previous lives crowded and interleaved above their heads. The Master curls around her, her skirts just-so though the Doctor is already splayed and disheveled, and when the Doctor tries to turn around, she captures and tucks her arms between them, not to be diverted, substituting palms for palms, fingers for fingers. 

So the Master’s hands are the hands that push the buttons from their buttonholes on the last vestment of the old Doctor. The Master’s hands move down the line of the shirt’s worn placket. It is the Master’s hands at the Doctor’s throat, her collarbone, her sternum. The Master draws the panels of the shirt aside. With caressing knuckles, she traces past her navel the imaginary line that is her centre axis, her plane of symmetry. 

Clever Master, clever friend, showing her the way, stroking with her thumb and tracing all the layers and surfaces and untouched varied folds of her, clever of the Master, too, to bring her here to learn who she is: who she always was, and has never been before. 

“Look, look!” she insists, and because it isn’t a command, the Doctor looks. The mirror shows her open-mouthed, brow furrowed, knees up to tilt her hips toward the burrowing fingers, her feet pushing flat against the floor. 

But the Master is open-mouthed too, intent, head bent into the weight of the Doctor pushing back into her, and it is this sight more than anything that releases her, and why is there so much light, and it is good—much _too_ good, and “_Missy_,” she breathes, and Missy isn’t going to stop until she’s decided it’s time to stop, and when she finally does, the Doctor can hardly see, and someone is very pleased with herself.

“That’s Mistress to you,” she says, and that’s fair enough, fine, it’s completely absolutely fine.

She releases the Doctor’s arms, pulls her hands out in front of them, floating them up on top of her own for inspection. 

“Now—” her tone silky, smug, schoolmarmish, and oh, oh so dangerous— “show me what you’ve learned.”

~

Later, as she’s blasting the Dalek from the girl, the Doctor remembers the cold moment of realisation, Missy already edging quietly away. Still watching. The Dalek arm—the gun—angry and seductive, and in spite of feeling all wrong calling to the panicked anger. It was a lie, of course, a lie like so many lies that day.

It would have felt good, shooting the Dalek. It would have felt good: the moment of no return, the beam striking metal, enveloping it, dripping like a wound, punishing it. The way it feels good now, only now she’s justified because this Dalek is a cruel parasite, riding a brave and good girl, using her to destroy her world. 

But the Dalek is screaming, and the girl is too. 

That Dalek, well, that Dalek hadn’t been a Dalek at all, and the fury had still been there, and that glassy bright attention in Missy’s eyes, which had wanted to see what would happen, but wanted so very much more to see what would happen now. 

Missy’s hand on his on the trigger. Missy waiting for the aftermath, the hideous discovery. The Doctor shouldn’t trust the Mistress, but it had turned out all right in the end, and she’d paid her debt, hadn’t she, left behind to the Dalek calamity...the Extremis sentence...and tears, real tears. Eventually. 

The Doctor is targetting the Dalek, laser screwdriver fat and powerful in her hand, and she knows that the nervous systems, forcibly grafted together, will transmit the pain of the Dalek into its host, but she also knows that it won’t kill the human, probably, might not, if she’s strong, and if they’re resolute.

But the girl is weak; she’s been fighting this invasion alone, bewildered, which means it might be too late.

“Fight it!” she shouts through gritted teeth. “On no account let it win!”

The girl snarls and laughs, Dalek insanity on human features, taking step by impossible step toward the Doctor, reaching out— The screwdriver grows hot with a final burst of energy. 

Then the girl is on the floor. The Dalek mass beside her. 

It is very quiet in the warehouse. 

The Doctor checks them both, but the girl is dead. 

It did feel good, shooting the Dalek. This, of course, doesn’t. There is a price, and she’s willing. She stays there, crouched low for a long time before she gets up to go.

~

This, too, is what it means to have a body. The Doctor wants very much to wrap her arms around Missy, to dig her nose into the cloth of Missy’s jacket, to close her eyes against Missy’s shoulder. But just as much, she wants to be left alone. She wants to take herself off into a dim, warm crevice and wait there until this sullen and savage sensation goes away. Until she can no longer feel it tugging at her face. 

It isn’t really a thing Time Lords do, but...after a while Missy comes up to her and takes the screwdriver out of her hand. She places it on the console (how long have they been stood here?) and pulls her away. 

It’s not really a thing Time Lords do, intrude upon one another’s privacy to provide comfort, succor. But it’s been a long time since the Doctor was fully Time Lord, with Time Lord needs rather than human ones. 

~

“I need to know,” she says, not really wanting to, “what happened to Bill.”

“Didn’t you see, in the rain? Someone was coming for her. She seemed happy.”

~

Bill, searching, yearning, inquisitive Bill—another friend swallowed by the machine and the shell and the monster, another friend fighting to stay human in the face of what the Doctor had allowed to happen. Isn’t it always the price? Is this what Missy had been trying to demonstrate? Always, in the end, the crisis, and the Doctor, powerless?

But there in the rain as Missy had led her away, the humanoid form of a young woman suggested by a fountain of water. Bill’s pilot friend, who had pursued them so far and turned out not to need them at all. It is a peripheral image sort of memory, a thing caught by the eye but hardly seen, the mind too busy trying not to remember that the person in the metal suit now hollow on the burnt ground had been a faithful friend who had even in the last moments stood steadfast and strong. 

~

Missy has disassembled the laser screwdriver. She is cleaning out the inside of the casing with a kerchief on a weighted string. She is brushing the crevices of the internal mechanism with a conical pipe cleaner. She lines the components along her workbench in the order of deconstruction, where they wink and hum, awaiting inspection. Each has a turn on the diadem of her fingers. Each she cleans and then diagnoses with a smaller, sharper screwdriver. 

When she has put the screwdriver back together, she sights along it as though to check its alignment for a projectile. The Doctor has been watching, and moves into its field of view. 

Missy, pupils dilating, holds her arm—and the screwdriver—steady. She shifts her body; the other shoulder pivots back, as though to adjust her stance for a duel, her posture formal, courteous, dead serious. 

“Do you wonder,” she croons, “what the full blast would feel like? No regeneration, no remaking? No tricks? Would you like me to tell you? Or maybe you’d like to find out for yourself.”

The Doctor scowls. “Give me that,” she says, making a grab for the screwdriver.

Missy grins, shrugs, and lets her have it.

The Doctor tucks it into the band of her trousers, letting her braces hold it snug against her t-shirt. 

Missy’s grin goes wider. “_Doctor_. Happy to see me? _Excited_ by our wee hypothetical, perhaps.”

The Doctor turns away so that her hair falls over her face. 

“You’d never have the nerve, in the end. Not when it comes down to it, not if you have a choice. You’ll always find someone to talk you out of it, someone who tells you you’re needed.”

“And you?” the Doctor mutters. “Would you tell me I’m needed?”

“I certainly wouldn’t want to meet you in the Matrix for an eternity of civilised debate and psychedelic manhunts.” Missy exhales and lets her voice go languid. “I’m supposed to say something here about a cosmos without the Doctor, I think.”

~

Better, maybe, that she doesn’t have the chance.

~

There is a great abrupt lurch like that very cosmos has come to a sudden stop and its contents have continued moving on unchecked momentum as the TARDIS falls out of the time vortex. 

Lights blow out. 

When they flash on again, too bright and brief and blinding, they show: an unshelled Dalek on the deck between them, leering, if a creature without teeth can leer. The spot on the deck where the Dalek had been, empty but for the glistening residue on the metal. 

Missy, tentacles caressing her shoulders and curling around her neck, her face a rictus, reflection of the fight inside, Time Lord against vermin, the violent infection tightening, spreading, invading, staining.

Shock, shock like all the air in her has been electrified. 

“No!”

The Doctor snatches Missy’s hand, and for a moment she can feel it, the Dalek consciousness inserting itself along Missy’s spine, flowing inexorable and abhorrent into every branch and division of her being, faster and stronger than it should. They’re mixing and battling, the Dalek’s hatred and the Master’s anger, the parasite’s march and Missy’s barricades, her refusal to cede to it her voice, her body; and underneath it all this startled affront, this I am a _Time Lord_, and the disgust, oh, there is no helpless bewilderment here, only contempt, only outrage—

And something else, alive, full of anticipation, gold—

“Don’t touch me!” Missy wrenches her hand away, shoves the Doctor, hard, so that she stumbles against the console. Missy slams herself back against one of the columns, as far as she can get, as hard as she can smash the thing clinging to her.

Except so much of it must be in her now.

She slumps, stunned, and the Doctor is paralysed, she is terrified, she is useless with horror.

“Shoot it!” Missy grimaces. She hisses. She shouts. “Kill it. You have the screwdriver. You’ve done it before. Kill it. Get this...obscene thing...out of me, and vaporise it this time. Kick it out into space. Let the vacuum destroy what’s left of it.”

The words come barely audible out of the Doctor’s mouth. 

“It’d kill you. No one can survive that.” 

The admission feels strange, like relief and like sadness, and like she’s been feeling all these things all along without any awareness of it. 

A craze of light appears on Missy’s skin, like cracks in the glaze on porcelain, like blood vessels but incandescent. 

“You fool, what do you think I’ve been doing? Ever since I came to find you in the ashes of your own regeneration. You thought I had left you, and I came back to you, and so you were free. That was such a blaze, to rival the hottest star, the superest nova. It kept me going. You kept me going. I thought I only had time to see you survive, but this—“ she holds up the outlines of her hands, touches them to the craquelure of her face. “This is yours. Don’t you _dare_ let that creature have it. Not this time. Not again.”

In the pastoral twilight, the Doctor’s plea to the Master and Missy had echoed and attenuated and seemed to disappear into the waiting blue air. Missy had gone after the Master, and why not? They were one person, they'd made that clear, and it had never been reasonable of the Doctor to expect to remake Missy, as though anyone could have that power. 

But in the final moments, on his knees in the ashes, the Doctor had seen the flash of purple. He’d felt the surge of hope. It was hope that had triggered the regeneration. It always was. 

Things did go wrong, but this is no cataclysm. This is the answer, this is the answer too. 

The Doctor has the Master’s laser screwdriver in her hand, and she doesn’t know how it got there. She doesn’t remember pulling it, doesn’t remember checking and aiming it, can’t feel its exaggerated, too-heavy weight. She doesn’t remember a lot of things; she's known it all along. How can she? How can she remember this? 

The light—but it is her light, the Doctor can feel that now—sings, stuttering, the Dalek’s laugh its dissonances, unresolvable. It’s atonal, it’s serial, it’s hexachords stacking, it’s sequences opening out into pure energy, uniform, sustained, and the final tone in the row is the Master’s screwdriver, the shrieked pitch, the last laugh. But it’s also Missy reaching out for her, reaching out to catch her, saying, it’s all right, this is right, I can see it, look!; there is a stopping, and when it’s right it is an ending, the end, the end, the end…

**Author's Note:**

> [Color and Light (there's only color and light...all that color and light)](https://youtu.be/sgQJSomGwDc?t=22)


End file.
